"That Mass Out There"

Gen. Alexander giving a keynote speech at BlackHat, the hackers' conference this month, where he was heckled.

Michael Hayden, former head of both the CIA and the NSA, obviously knows a lot about the issues of espionage and secrecy and what the threats are to our country.

Here's what he had to say in a Quartz interview with Josh Meyer:

What cyber threats do you find most concerning?

You’ve got three levels of threats; the shorthand is steal, disrupt and destroy. You’ve also got three levels of actors. You’ve got nation states, you’ve got criminal elements and then you’ve got that mass out there; activists, nihilists, anarchists, Anonymous, Lulzsec and so on. And blessedly the order I gave them to you—states, criminals the rest – is pretty much a ranking of their capability. And what we’re seeing is that all the boats in the harbor are going up, and so capabilities we now associate with criminal gangs or mid-range nation states will over time become available to this third group.

As tough as attribution is, nation states still have to believe that they are responsible for their actions. There can be sanctions and retaliations. Criminal groups, they’re after the money, and they’re in kind of a symbiotic relationship with their targets and even in nature, the parasite would be unwise to kill the host. But the third group, they have sometimes unreasonable, unmeetable, undefinable demands. In one, three or five years, you’ve got a group out there that’s opposed to capitalism, let’s say. And if they start to get some of these advanced capabilities, the very destructive attack for ideological purposes is going to be more possible and more likely. So my line to folks is, this is going to get worse before it gets better.

(Emphasis added)

I'm sure this quotation drives the left and the "progressives" mad -- it makes it seem like "activists" are equated with criminals and protesting capitalism is equated with terror.

But I guess what he means is frankly where the real threat is very specifically coming from. The thing to focus on here isn't the edge-casing about some activist who is an innocent innovator, but to look frankly at that very destructive attack for ideological purposes from this group opposed to capitalism -- and that is the hackers, nihilists, Anonymous, Lulzsec -- and he's absolutely right. They are the technocommunists. This is what you have to worry about. No, history doesn't repeat with farce here, it just repeats.

Glenn Greenwald whined today that the press, each time it writes about Hayden, has to note that he is now (presumably) high-paid consultant for the Chertoff Group.

Supposedly if we read through that link, we're supposed to...what...come away with the impression that the dirty business of consulting for, oh, Stratfor or somebody on things like cybersecurity and response to attacks is...like the dirty business of enabling hackers and writing about their onslaught on American liberal democracy?

Somehow, I'm just not impressed that Chertoff is the problem here. Maybe because I don't believe in anything about Snowden, WikiLeaks, and Greenwald except that it's a fraud -- that began, as it is ending, in Moscow.

When General Alexander rightly talked about the threat of Anonymous, naturally  it drew a backlash of minimization and even ridicule from the usual suspects that always control the narrative.

I remember how happy @StevenLevy was to tweet during Hurricane Sandy that the stock market exchange on Wall Street was under water (it was never true).

And I remember how many people blasted me some years ago when I reprinted the story -- later refuted -- of a hacker getting into a water system (and continued to keep asking questions about it even after the company itself claimed later that it was just a Russian programmer they had who logged on from Russia).

Now it's absolutely accepted to talk about hackers breaking into water and power systems and even honeypots are made to test them.

When I saw the sheer vitriolic hate that some of the Occupy Wall Street cadres had for capitalism and institutions, and their greedy zeal for destroying them -- I'll never forget that self-professed communist professor from Genneseo saying flatly "we're going to come and take your stuff" -- I felt this threat might be rather close. Fortunately, Occupy Wall Street mainly sunk of its own radical, extreme and idiotic weight. Good. For now.

When I saw the attack on the justice system -- because that's really what it was, an active measure aimed against the American justice system as an institution to make people lose faith in it -- that Anonymous pulled in Steubenville, even as Anonymous was attacking MIT and the US Sentencing Commission over Swartz, I really felt as if the battering was going to have an effect. Fortunately, that crisis passed, too, with justice served to the rape victim -- and not by Anonymous -- and with one Anonymous arrested.

What is the way to deal with these threats? I'm not privy to the counsels of Gen. Alexander or Gen. Hayden, but I don't mind if they or their successors go on seeing this as a war and fighting it -- it is, and our freedom is at stake. I don't believe that fighting it worsens it or that some crazy accommodation has to be made to the cyberwarriors Russia and China.

More practically, however, I think a simple thing has to be done: a think-tank has to appear in Washington that begins to critically push back against all the hard-left, "progressive," technocommunist solutions being propagated -- and the technoliberarian propaganda and noise around these Internet subjects as well -- and carve out a profile of Internet liberalism that balances freedom and the security needed to preserve the very possibility of freedom.

There is no such think-tank or NGO today. Instead, you have all the Soros-funded groups like New America Foundation or Electronic Frontier Foundation gabbling on about how information wants to be free. You have outright lobbying offices for Silicon Valley, from Facebook and Twitter, which promulgate these views, and then their virtual fronts like the Sunlight Foundation. You have radical groups like Foundation for the Free Press, Save the Internet Foundation, etc. which are really all variations of John Perry Barlow and friends. You then have the libertarian side of this movement which is barely distinguishable on many issues, like Tech Freedom and Tech Liberation Front and the Volokh Conspiracy.

Tech Liberation Front provides a refreshing pushback to Susan Crawford's collectivism and even blatant technocommunism by constantly making fact-based arguments about the realities of broadband and the market. But then they go off opposing SOPA or CISPA because of their libertarian ethos.

What is needed is a group that is not paid for by the tech industry or Soros (although he wouldn't pay for it and likely they wouldn't either) but which establishes that the Internet is a normal area of human activity like any other that should be brought under the rule of law -- as if it were not some special autonomous realm and proto-world government. It should go about making absolutely clear that "that mass out there" is not what we want in the way of society or government or culture.

This group would have to do the usual Washington things -- commissioning white papers, holding panels and seminars and big conferences and nurturing fellows. It's too bad there is absolutely no hope of such a thing coming into existence unless I wish the lottery LOL.

But the problem is, again and again, when things like the Snowden issue come up, there is the official government position, which might be terse silence or a few feel-goods or actual capitulation to the awful hackers' movements (SOPA and CISPA) with pledges to veto legislation that a lot of democratically-elected people also diligently worked on.

So what is needed is a separate, independent think-tank that supports the basics of US government policy -- the Internet freedom program involving assistance overseas particularly for circumvention; study and strategic countering of the criminal sides of that very darknet of circumventionists; opposition to encryption of all communications -- and then also pushes for cybersecurity law that would apply the same legal principles of any other area of human relations and law.

Instead of Ron Wyden and Mark Udall and Mike Myasnick and Berin Szoka and Evgeny Morozov being the only voices ever heard every time there is a policy issue like net neutrality or Aaron Swartz's prosecution or the CFAA or CISPA or Snowden, you would have X, Y, and Z that would bring a more critical and balanced perspective to the national stage.

Who would be in this think-tank? It's hard to think of any prominent dissenters to these perspectives except Jaron Lanier. That is, Morozov is so often taken as the dissenter that people don't get it about him -- he'd be just as liable to oppose SOPA or change CFAA in the radical ways that EFF wants -- like giving a special exemption to hackers that are "especially creative" in their hacks, in recognition of their genius -- and letting them off from prison when they hack, or giving special dispensation to "tinkerers" and "inventors" if they violate IP because they're "innovative". I'm not kidding. That is the sort of myopic, self-interested sort of thing they recommend.

Would it be possible to have some prestigious figure like Gen. Michael Hayden in such a think-tank?  Perhaps.

But when Gen. Alexander retires in 2014, what he might do, instead of disappearing into some quiet outfit like the Chertoff Group or some other Beltway bandit, should start a very public, very public-service non-profit that works for sound and sane Internet policy -- given that he has the liberal credentials of having served under the Obama Administration.

This lobbying group would obviously have to be a mixture of civilian and military.  It really is hard to think up names for such a venture precisely because has been so captured by radicals, but somehow, a start has to be made.